Case Study 5 - Mozilla Firefox

Firefox has come up a long way since version 1.

Firefox sometimes gets confused with how many downloads are actually open:

Apparently, every item on the history pop-up menu goes back by one page. Even if it is not the previous page. Firefox can’t count above one, maybe?

If you go to select some text in a <textarea> tag and start dragging the control border by mistake, the whole form control just disappears (and Firefox 3.5 still does this):

The next picture shows it telling me to drag a favicon. A dimmed, disabled favicon. That is definitely not going anywhere.

Why is it dimmed anyhow?

And how comes you can view the source of an image, and find it full of Chinese and Arabic?

Here, I have two Firefox menus permanently stuck on my screen. I am not sure why.

A common Firefox bug, next – all your favourites suddenly disappear:

The following image appears to have something missing:

The next screenshot shows a Firefox window resized nice and small. But where are the scroll bars?

Firefox is not as much a browser as a shell; Gecko is where all the real hard work goes on. But what is it doing with this ordered list?

The following picture shows me having, mysteriously, two Google entries in the search menu (and I have not installed any extra seaches):

Finally, one day this message appeared every time I tried to load it:

Re-running the installer made it go away though.